Eastwood's insightful Letters' works well as flip side to Flags'

[thedrifter]

Eastwood's insightful Letters' works well as flip side to Flags'
Friday, January 19, 2007
Clint O'Connor
Plain Dealer Film Critic

One of the most horrific moments in Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" occurs when U.S. Marines finally break through to the tunnels and caves of the enemy.

The battle on Iwo Jima has been raging for a month. More than 27,000 men have been killed. Some killed themselves. And that's what the Marines find. Japanese soldiers who took their lives in a definitive way: holding a grenade over their hearts.

The bloody aftermath is a painful film moment, but we don't see how they blew themselves up. In "Letters From Iwo Jima," we do.

Eastwood's powerful, moving instant follow-up to "Flags of Our Fathers" lands in Cleveland today. It tells the story of the World War II battle for Iwo Jima in February and March 1945 from the Japanese perspective. To Eastwood's great credit, the film is in Japanese, with a primarily Japanese cast. It was shot on the island of Iwo Jima (as well as in Iceland and Los Angeles).

"Flags" paid tribute to the Americans who fought and died there, but it was not a conventional war movie. It poked holes in myth making, hero worship and war propaganda. In "Flags," the Japanese were faceless killers, gunning down Americans from caves and pillboxes connected by more than 18 miles of tunnels.

In "Letters," Eastwood uses his estimable talents of filmmaking and storytelling to turn the world around. This time, not only do the Japanese have faces, they have names, families, feelings, histories, hearts, souls, fears, beliefs, lives. In so many war movies, the Japanese or Germans are cardboard cutouts. In "Letters," we're forced to consider our enemy in the most human terms.

The film follows Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who devised the tunnel and cave strategy. The general is portrayed as a reluctant pragmatist, not a crazed murderer. Some of the insights into his character came from a collection of letters he had mailed to his wife and children pre-Iwo Jima.

In the tunnels, we meet Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker-turned-soldier who isn't too keen on the whole kill-yourself-rather-than-surrender strategy. He questions the "honor" of death. His face splattered with the blood of his buddy who just chose a hand grenade, Saigo makes a run for it.

There's no more joy in seeing countless Japanese die than there was seeing countless Americans die in the first film. Eastwood was interested in the nuances on both sides, the hidden reality not found in the screaming headlines or forgotten memorials.

You can see "Letters" without having seen "Flags," but it's a much richer, more interesting experience seeing it as the bookend. It's also a much better film.

Eastwood has now produced two anti-war war movies that honor the fallen. On both sides.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

coconnor@plaind.com, 216-999-4456

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Smog of war
'Letters from Iwo Jima' tells us that 'We have met the enemy, and he is us' -- but we already knew that
By Michael Sragow
Sun Movie Critic
Originally published January 19, 2007

Clint Eastwood's critical hit and box-office bomb, Flags of Our Fathers, fumbled its Marines'-eye view of the Battle of Iwo Jima over 36 bloody days early in 1945. Its awkward combat scenes echoed but didn't match the D-Day sequence in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Its choppy home- front scenes about the U.S. propaganda machine plunged into maudlin melodrama. Eastwood was justly lauded for trying to go beyond a rah-rah point-of-view. But the fog of war was more like smog in the gray visual and emotional palette of Flags of Our Fathers.

And it is again in Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood's companion film, which depicts the same history from the Japanese position. While scouring Japanese material such as Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commander of the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima, and Sadness in Dying Gracefully, by Kumiko Kakehashi, Eastwood came to grips with the insight that, during war, bad things happen to good people on both sides.

Sadly, what Eastwood, story-writer Paul Haggis and screenwriter Iris Yama****a have created from their humanistic urge resembles a United Nations made-for-TV movie from 40 years ago, wearing its good heart on its khaki sleeve. Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

As a piece of narrative moviemaking, it is several giant steps back from Eastwood's career highpoint, Unforgiven. He rarely conveys the scope of the battle's carnage. Edwin P. Hoyt's Japan's War states that each side endured, by rough count, an astounding 21,000 casualties - and for the Japanese, the 21,000 were all fatalities, with a mere 212 prisoners of war. (Hoyt cites the American dead as 4,500; others say 6,000.)

William Manchester in Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War compares the scene at Iwo Jima to "Dore's illustrations of the Inferno. ... The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent. There seemed to be no clean wounds; just fragments of corpses."

Aside from clumsy computer-generated views of American convoys, Eastwood makes it seem as if there were a few dozen combatants on each side. The chronology is hazy, the exposition haphazard and confused. You're trapped with the Japanese in their tunnels, in the dark. Every now and then, an explosion illuminates their faces, but never their characters.

The moviemakers lurch between Kuribayashi, their hero, and a baker named Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), their everyman. The general is like any humane war-movie commander who has attempted to cut off deadwood and energize his staff and troops. Saigo is like any scared war-movie draftee who has wished he could abandon his position and be with his wife and newborn child. (Like Ira Hayes in Flags of Our Fathers, he dissolves into a pool of tears.)

These two protagonists don't reflect the rabid nationalist, militaristic ethos that made Japan such a fierce and fearsome enemy. How did the masses get seduced? There's a scene of neighbors applying peer pressure to a stunned Saigo and his upset, pregnant wife when he's being press-ganged into service. But that only demonstrates the existence of an all-consuming super-patriotism, not how or why it took root.

Earnest and flaccid, Letters from Iwo Jima spends so much time conveying the similarities of Japanese to American soldiers, even during a gory, pitiless clash, that it says almost nothing about the differences. What kind of culture encourages men to become kamikazes - suicide bombers - and even to commit suicide as an act of honor, redeeming their failures, rather than live with defeat (or even live to fight another day)? In Letters from Iwo Jima, the men who kill themselves with grenades are as distant to the heroes as they are to us.

The film is full of scenes like the one in which Japanese soldiers hear a letter to a dead American soldier from his mom and realize that she's just like their own moms. We get the point: We're all alike. But, if so, what separated us? The movie has been hailed for not being didactic. Well, to be didactic you need to have something to teach.

When Kuribayashi assumes command, he explores the island on foot, then reads the riot act to his underlings: No more beatings or useless punishments just for mouthing off or getting the jitters; no more digging trenches on the beach when the real fights will take place on the high ground. Kuribayashi commands his men to dig underground tunnels in the hard rock of Iwo Jima's volcanic terrain.

The movie doesn't involve us deeply in the hatching and fulfillment of this strategy. It never forces its American audience to confront the bitter irony of a noble Japanese officer coming up with a battle plan that leads to a higher U.S. body count.

Eastwood is more concerned with painting Kuribayashi as an officer and gentleman that anyone would want on his team. He apologizes to his wife for not finishing the kitchen floor; he sends drawings to his son of happy pre-war days in America. He knows that Americans will fight a mobile campaign because he remembers how many cars he saw in the United States when he was stationed there. He once thought of Japan and the U.S. as natural allies.

At times, the movie beggars belief. We learn that a member of Japan's elite military police got thrown out because he didn't follow orders to shoot a dog. Was this the worst punishment that a cruel corps could think of - busting him to regular soldier? We do get fleeting suggestions of extreme or desperate Japanese tactics. One officer tells his men to shoot when they see the Red Cross, because Americans will send extra manpower to guard medics. Another straps an explosive device to his chest and waits for a tank to rumble over him. But the Yama****a-Haggis script relies for dramatic power not on a clear-eyed view of history or character but on gimmicks, like Kuribayashi's sporty Colt gun. His men assume he took it from a dead American. We find out that American friends gave it to him as a gift.

Eastwood isn't as hard on the Japanese --- or for that matter, the Americans - as the greatest living Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, has been on his countrymen and everyone else. This movie pales before Icihkawa's 1961 masterpiece, Fires on the Plain, set during a similar episode of Second World War carnage: the Japanese command's abandonment of their men on Leyte Island in the Philippines. Critic Pauline Kael called Ichikawa's epic "this great visual demonstration that men are not brothers." Letters from Iwo Jima argues so feebly for brotherhood it makes you feel that "the family of man" is just another big lie.

>>>Letters from Iwo Jima (Warner Bros.) Starring Ken Watanabe, Tsuyoishi Ihara, Kazunari Ninomiya. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Rated R. Time 141 minutes.


michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Honor bound <br />
BY KEVIN CAPP <br />
<br />
IF YOU'RE AN AMERICAN, A STRANGE FEELING bubbles up inside you when, after getting to know the Japanese soldiers training and digging trenches on the lonely island of...

[thedrifter]

Posted on Fri, Jan. 19, 2007

Like the general, the star had doubts
Watanabe questioned if an American should tell a Japanese story. Then he talked to Eastwood.
By STEVEN REA
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Ken Watanabe was wary and unsure when he first heard news that Clint Eastwood wanted to make “Letters From Iwo Jima.”

A companion piece to the American director and Hollywood icon’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” about the World War II battle for the tiny isle 500 miles south of Japan, “Letters” would offer the flip side. It would show the defenders’ perspective, the story of the 22,000 Japanese who dug in and fought — almost all to the death (only 1,083 survived) — against the historic onslaught of Marines.

“At the time, I thought it should be a Japanese project, with a Japanese director and a Japanese producer and a Japanese studio,” says the actor, on the phone from Tokyo.

“But I got a call from Clint and then I met with him. I told him that I was really concerned about why he wanted to make this movie, and how can he make a Japanese film?”

Eastwood made his case, explaining that he saw “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima” as companion pieces, the halves that make the whole, and that telling just one side of the story — the Americans’ — would leave it incomplete.

“Flags of Our Fathers,” which opened in October, described the epic invasion of Iwo Jima by U.S. forces and also the subsequent public-relations campaign in which the Marines who raised the Stars and Stripes on the island’s Mount Suribachi were paraded around the States in an effort to raise millions in war bonds.

“What became clear to me was that Clint had a strong will to cross the boundaries of culture and language and make the best film possible, the most truthful film possible,” Watanabe said. “All Clint wanted to do was present the reality of war, the truth of what happened, and to let the audiences decide.”

In “Letters,” Watanabe, the 47-year-old actor best known to American audiences for his roles in “The Last Samurai” and “Memoirs of a Geisha,” stars as Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the erudite officer who led his men in the 36-day battle in the early weeks of 1945, fully aware that his mission was doomed.

“Letters” has been the recipient of rave reviews, numerous best-of-2006 kudos and the Golden Globe for best foreign language film. In Japan “Letters” has easily outgrossed “Flags.” But Watanabe says that as significant as “Letters’ ” box office is, $34 million and counting, it’s the public’s reaction that has moved him.

“There is not a strong tradition of war movies in Japan,” he says, with the occasional help of a translator. “Especially movies about World War II. And the ones that have been made are almost always antiwar, (about) victims’ feelings, about the atomic bomb.”

And, he says, many younger Japanese do not know about Iwo Jima. World War II, Watanabe says, is not a focus of history books in his country’s schools. Japan is a culture that has not sent troops into battle for almost 60 years.

Like “Flags,” “Letters” was shot mainly on the volcanic terrain of Iceland, and on soundstages in Hollywood.

“When I first saw the final film, with the computer graphics and the sound and everything, I was so surprised. Wow!”

Ellie